There exist many types of networks and shared information communications systems. Events may occur in networks (such as access networks) that are external to a packet network provider. For example, if a network is temporarily down or seriously impaired, incoming calls destined to these affected subscribers cannot be successfully completed. All of these incoming calls are instead redirected to voice mail which can cause overload conditions in media servers (MS) that play out voice mail announcements and are usually engineered at a lower capacity level than basic call loads. Consequently, many of these calls get blocked and customer dissatisfaction will result. Broadly defined, a MS is a special server that typically handles and terminates media streams, and also provides services such as announcements, bridges, transcoding, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messages.
Traditional communications involve sharing of signaling servers and media resources among application servers using an existing shared network interface unit (Shared NIU) feature. Each signaling server manages a set of media resources. On the media side, if a media box goes down, there is another media box that can be used—n+1 approach. For example, the standby network elements may be hot standby elements or components. A hot standby component is a secondary component which is running simultaneously with the Primary component that can, within a very short period of time (e.g., in the range of milliseconds), be switched over to backup or augment the Primary component. When used in the backup mode, the hot standby component can simply take over the function of the Primary component if the Primary component fails. When used in the augmentation mode, the hot standby component can augment the processing capacity of the Primary component when the Primary component is getting overloaded. However, a problem occurs when a signaling server fails. In this case, the associated media resources are unusable by applications.
In order to solve this problem, it is advantageous to provide a network architecture to accommodate utilizing all resources. It would thus be highly desirable to provide a distributed SIP silo signaling (DSS) system and method.